Wes Streeting questions affordability of setting up NHS assisted dying service

‘There isn’t a budget for this,’ health secretary says after MPs vote to legalise procedure in England and Wales

Wes Streeting has voiced doubts over whether the NHS can afford to establish an assisted dying service, after MPs passed a bill to legalise the procedure last week.

The health secretary was previously a supporter of assisted dying but switched sides last year, expressing concerns about the ethics of offering such a service before significant improvements could be made to the NHS.

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Esther Rantzen hails Commons passage of ‘rigorous and safe’ assisted dying bill

Campaigner, who has terminal cancer, hopes bill will make it past any potential obstacles in the Lords

The assisted dying bill, if it becomes law, will remove the burden of seeing a loved one die in pain, the campaigner Esther Rantzen has said, insisting its backers have got right the balance between helping those who ask for it and protecting vulnerable people.

The terminally ill adults (end of life) bill cleared the Commons with a majority of 23 votes on Friday, but must yet be debated by the Lords before returning to the Commons for consideration of any amendments they may make.

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Aqua lungs: how Rod Stewart’s underwater swimming may help his singing

Singer trains underwater like Frank Sinatra once did and scientists say it may be useful in maintaining vocal prowess

Frank Sinatra did it his way, taking to the pool to boost his vocal prowess, and it seems Rod Stewart is singing from the same songsheet. Now scientists say the approach might not be somethin’ stupid.

Stewart, 80, is still entertaining fans with his raspy vocals and energetic stage performances and earlier this month he revealed that as well as running and playing some football, swimming also played a key part in his campaign to stay forever young.

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Campaign for statue of British suffragette hero is hit by funding crisis

Organisers seek an extra £40,000 for a memorial to Mary Clarke, the first suffragette to die for women’s rights

The campaign to commemorate the first suffragette to die for women’s rights is facing a funding crisis.

Mary Clarke, who was the sister of Emmeline Pankhurst, helped found the Women’s Social and Political Union and was imprisoned three times.

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Assisted dying set to become law in England and Wales after MPs pass bill

Terminally ill people with less than six months to live will have right to choose procedure after approval from doctors and panel

Terminally ill people in England and Wales are to be given the right to an assisted death in a historic societal shift that will transform end-of-life care.

After months of argument, MPs narrowly voted in favour of a private member’s bill introduced by Labour’s Kim Leadbeater, which could become law within four years.

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£5bn UK overseas aid cuts cannot be challenged in court, say government lawyers

Claim comes in legal exchange with advocacy group ahead of judicial review of decision to slash support to 0.3% of gross national income

Cuts of £5bn to the UK overseas aid budget cannot be challenged in the courts, government lawyers have said, even though ministers have no plan to return spending to the legal commitment of 0.7 % of UK gross national income (GNI).

The assertion by Treasury solicitors that ministers are immune from legal challenge over aid cuts comes in preliminary exchanges with the aid advocacy group One Campaign. It is the first step in what could prove a highly embarrassing judicial review.

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Grooming gang survivors tell MPs to stop ‘tug-of-war with vulnerable women’ – UK politics live

Two survivors urged politicians and those without experience of abuse to allow women to shape the investigation

Campaigners from trade unions, voluntary organisations and the Church of Scotland have announced plans for an anti-poverty march to “demand better” from politicians in Scotland, reports the PA news agency.

The campaign, Scotland Demands Better, will culminate in a march in Edinburgh on 25 October, walking from the Scottish parliament, up the Royal Mile and along George IV Bridge to The Meadows.

Change for the better happens when people stand together and demand it. Scotland desperately needs that change.

Too many of us are being cut off from life’s essentials. Too many are frightened of what the future will bring. Too many of us are feeling tired, angry, isolated, and disillusioned.

Air pollution remains the most important environmental threat to health, with impacts throughout the life course.

It is an area of health where the UK has made substantial progress in the last three decades, with concentrations of many of the main pollutants falling rapidly, but it remains a major cause of chronic ill health as well as premature mortality.

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Remove decisions on lone child asylum seekers from Home Office, report says

Call for root-and-branch reform of treatment of children, many of whom are wrongly classified as adults

Decisions relating to lone child asylum seekers should be removed from Home Office officials because of fundamental problems with the way they treat this vulnerable group, a report has found.

The report calls for root-and-branch reform of the treatment of thousands of children who have fled persecution in their home countries and made hazardous journeys in search of safety, often crossing the Channel in a dinghy or concealing themselves in the back of a lorry.

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UK watchdog criticises ‘offensive’ portrayal of older people in adverts

ASA report finds many use negative stereotypes and highlights concerns about targeting of end-of-life services

An elderly man fires off a tirade at a child who has asked “grandad” to return a mud-covered football that has landed on his gleaming car. He is then seen eating a microwave dinner for one and chuckling, with the now-deflated ball pinned to the table next to him by a large kitchen knife.

The TV advert for the Scotland-based Strathmore Foods, maker of the McIntosh of Strathmore ready meals stocked by most big supermarket chains, has been identified in a report by the UK advertising watchdog as showing an “offensive” portrayal of older people – by stereotyping them as grumpy and intolerant, and implying many are lonely and isolated.

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Scottish government faces legal action over failure to implement biological sex ruling

Campaign group accuses Holyrood of ‘intolerable’ delays to new policies required after landmark case

The Scottish government has been given a deadline to implement the UK supreme court’s ruling on biological sex across all public bodies or face further legal challenges.

Sex Matters, the UK-wide gender-critical campaign group, has threatened legal action in 14 days if ministers continue “intolerable” delays to new policies and guidance required by April’s landmark ruling that the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 does not include transgender women who hold gender recognition certificates.

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Pepper spray use in youth prisons irresponsible amid racial disparities, watchdog warns

Head of monitoring boards urges justice secretary to suspend rollout of Pava in England and Wales

The rollout of synthetic pepper spray for use to incapacitate jailed children is “wholly irresponsible” while black and minority prisoners are more likely to be subjected to force than white inmates, a watchdog has said.

Elisabeth Davies, the national chair of the Independent Monitoring Boards, whose members operate in every prison in England and Wales, said the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, should pause the use of Pava spray in youth offending institutions (YOIs) until ministers had addressed the disproportionate use of force on minority prisoners.

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Woman dies of rabies in Yorkshire after contact with dog in Morocco

Yvonne Ford, from Barnsley, had contact with stray animal while on holiday, UK Health Security Agency says

A woman from Yorkshire has died from rabies after contact with a stray dog while on holiday in Morocco, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has said.

Yvonne Ford, from Barnsley in South Yorkshire, was diagnosed in Yorkshire and Humber after returning from the north African country in February.

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MPs back bill to end criminal penalties for abortion in key vote – as it happened

Parliament votes on biggest shake-up to reproductive rights in England and Wales in 60 years

Casey says in the past government has talked relentlessly about the need for better data sharing between departments.

But she says there is a need to consider making this mandatory.

I was there when the tragedy of Soham happened. We knew at that point that if we had had better data sharing there’s a possibility that we might have saved those girls’ lives. There’s certaintly an absolute clarity that intelligence would have been much faster in either avoiding it or or actually finding that dreadful human being earlier.

And we’ve known that forever onwards. And so I think there is also an issue that the Home Office can’t drag their feet on, looking at police intelligence systems, given we’ve living in the 21st century. Probably everbody in this room can connect within seconds. Yet we had Befordshire police finding a young boy that was being, in my mind trafficked to London. But the data intelligence system did not make it easy for them to find that he was in Deptford and being circled and dealt with by predators.

I feel very strongly on issues that are as searing as people’s race, when we know the prejudice and racism that people of colour experience in this country, to not get how you treat that data right is a different level of public irresponsibility.

Sorry, to put it so bluntly, I didn’t put it that bluntly yesterday, but I think it’s particularly important if you are collecting those sorts of issues to get them 100% right.

When we asked the good people of Greater Manchester Police to help us look at the data we also collected – I think it’s in the report – what was happening with child abuse more generally, and of course … if you look at the data on child sexual exploitation, suspects and offenders, it’s disproportionately Asian heritage. If you look at the data for child abuse, it is not disproportionate, and it is white men.

So again, just note to everybody, really outside here rather than in here. Let’s just keep calm here about how you interrogate data and what you draw from it.

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Government officials brace for up to 50 Labour MPs rebelling against welfare bill

Sources say party should have focused on the moral case for reforming the benefits system

Government officials have admitted they made a mistake by making the financial case for cutting benefits as they steel themselves for as many as 50 Labour MPs rebelling against the welfare bill that is being published on Wednesday.

Sources told the Guardian that they now believed the party should have focused on the moral case for reforming the welfare system, arguing that it was letting down millions of people who could be supported into work.

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Calls for abortion law change grew louder as number of prosecutions rose

While parliament was moving towards more liberal abortion laws more women were being arrested or investigated

Calls for decriminalisation of abortions have been growing louder in recent years – in line with a growing number of women being prosecuted for terminating their pregnancies.

Until 2022, it is believed that only three women had ever been convicted of having an illegal abortion in the 150 years since 1861, when the procedure was made illegal under the Offences Against the Person Act.

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MPs vote to decriminalise abortion in step forward for reproductive rights

Amendment to crime and policing bill will change law to end prosecution of women who terminate pregnancies

British MPs have voted to decriminalise abortion, marking the biggest step forward in reproductive rights in almost 60 years.

In an amendment to the government’s crime and policing bill, parliament voted to change the criminal laws that govern abortion in England and Wales so that women procuring a termination outside the legal framework cannot be prosecuted.

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Adult gaming centres failing to help problem gamblers self-exclude

UK regulator expresses concern as vast majority of centres visited by the BBC did not properly implement scheme

Flaws in a scheme meant to help gamblers bar themselves from 24-hour slot machine shops have been described by the industry regulator as “very concerning”, following revelations in a BBC documentary.

The Guardian has previously revealed how gambling operators are exploiting favourable planning and licensing laws to flood UK high streets with “adult gaming centres” (AGCs), which are disproportionately concentrated in the poorest areas.

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NHS staff unsettled by patients filming care and posting videos on social media

Radiographers voice concerns about being filmed without consent and say trend could violate other patients’ privacy

NHS staff have voiced concern about the growing numbers of patients who are filming themselves undergoing medical treatment and uploading it to TikTok and Instagram.

Radiographers, who take X-rays and scans, fear the trend could compromise the privacy of other patients being treated nearby and lead to staff having their work discussed online.

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Preparatory work to identify remains of 800 infants at Irish mother and baby home begins

Excavation crews begin sealing off site in Tuam, Co Galway, before full-scale dig starts on 14 July

Preliminary work aimed at identifying the remains of nearly 800 infants is starting on the site in Tuam, Co Galway, as Ireland continues to wrestle with the traumatic legacy of its mother and baby homes scandal.

Catherine Corless, a local historian who first sounded the alarm about the dark past of the institution run by nuns from the Bon Secours order, uncovered the names of 796 infants who are believed to have been buried there between 1925 and 1961, some in a disused subterranean septic tank. There were no burial records.

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‘Labour has made me feel like a scrounger’: disabled people urge welfare cuts rethink

People who rely on personal independence payments tell how cuts will affect them as chancellor rules out U-turn

Ministers are facing a backlash over planned disability welfare changes, but Rachel Reeves on Thursday resisted calls to abandon the cuts.

After ruling out a U-turn, pressure is building on the UK chancellor to tweak qualification rules to protect many disabled people from being stripped of their benefits. On Thursday, she said the government was “reviewing the criteria”, but ministers are yet to release details.

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